Holy Haleakala! Yesterday, a gamma-ray burst went off that was so bright that had you been looking at the right spot in the sky you could have seen it with just your own eyes!

It’s difficult to put this into the proper context. GRBs are monumental explosions, the exploding of a massive star where most of the energy of the catastrophe is channeled into twin beams of energy. These beams scream out from the explosion like cosmic blowtorches, and for thousands of light years anything they touch is destroyed. Happily for us, GRBs always appear hundreds of millions or billions of light years away.

Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.

The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.

In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.

There is, quite simply, no way to exaggerate the devastation of a gamma-ray burst.

Yet for all that, they are optically faint due to their terrible distance. At billions of light years away, even the Universe’s second biggest bangs are difficult to see.

This is the single brightest GRB ever seen in optical light, so as you can imagine reports are pouring in from observatories all over the world right now. Anything this bright must be extraordinary, and you can bet that astronomers will be falling over themselves to observe this incredible event. We still don’t know enough about GRBS; just what mechanisms focus those beams? We know black holes are at their core, powering these events, but how do the gravity and magnetic fields come together to generate forces like this? How tightly focused are the beams? Do they open at a one degree angle? 5? 10? Why does every GRB behave somewhat differently, with some lasting for seconds and others for minutes?

And why was this one so frakkin’ bright? Was it a more energetic explosion itself, or were we, by coincidence, looking precisely down the center of the beam? If the beam of a GRB is pointed ever-so-slightly away from us, so that the edge nicks us, the GRB will look fainter. By staring down the throat of a GRB we’d see it as bright as it could possibly be. Maybe GRB080319B had us dead in its sights.

Watching the extremes of GRB behavior can help us constrain the more normal aspects of them… if you can even use the word "normal" when it comes to such titanic explosions on these scales. There is a fascination we humans have with such terrible events, an atavistic thrill even when our puny brains can’t comprehend the size and scale of them.

I wrote about GRBs extensively for my book Death from the Skies!, and spent a lot of time working through the math and thinking about the destruction they can wreak. If you want to know what my nightmares look like, then GRBs are a good place to start. I’m just glad there (most likely) aren’t any stars nearby that can do this. I like GRBs… when they’re far, far away.

I haven’t seen any images floating around yet, but they’ll pop up soon. I’ll try to stay on top of this; I imagine that we’ll be hearing about it for weeks; as it fades we can see the host galaxy better, and astronomers will be on that like ugly on an ape.

7.5 billion light years … apparent magnitude +5.6 … If I did my math right, this sucker had an absolute magnitude of -36.2. The Milky Way’s is -20.5, so for those few seconds the GRB was more than one million times brighter than our whole galaxy.

To put things in a somewhat more local perspective, it would have been (momentarily) brighter than Venus if it were anywhere in the Virgo Cluster, almost as bright as the full Moon if it were in the Andromeda Galaxy, and brighter than the Sun anywhere within several thousand light years.

Dr. BA, you said that there probably aren’t any stars close to us that can go GRB, what about Eta Carinae? Is it too small? I surely hope so, because it’s known to be *rather* unstable, and at it’s distance, if it went *BOOM* like GRB080319B we’d be icky toast in short order.

I just happened to do the math: at a distance of 2700 light years, GRB 080319B would have been as bright as the Sun. At that distance, you’d need a telescope to see the Sun at all – it would be about 14th magnitude.

If the bursts are truly random, then in all likelihood once a while there should be bigger clumps like yesterday.

An image of the burst at magnitude 19 as seen from our local astronomy association’s telescope. They were lucky to catch the afterglow, as the weather was far from perfect.

I just happened to do the math: at a distance of 2700 light years, GRB 080319B would have been as bright as the Sun. At that distance, you’d need a telescope to see the Sun at all – it would be about 14th magnitude.

And in gamma rays the burst would be insanely brighter than our star and make our life rather difficult.

I don’t know why people are scared of these things. If one goes off in our celestial backyard, they won’t have any time to worry about dying because they’ll already be dead. It’s the same mentality that allows them to fear being attacked by vampires or werewolves as they walk home in the dark after seeing a movie that contains such. If you’ve got something like that on your tail, there’s no point in worrying about it because you’re hosed no matter what you do.

Besides, it’s obviously the system-destroying super-weapon of some intergalactic super-villain. Zapp Branigan or Luke Skywalker or James Kirk will be along in a bit to sort things out.

Rui Borges: Damn, and I thought I was the first person to think of that! I did a quick text search for “Arthur” on this page and nothing came up, so I thought I’d get in quick. Didn’t think to search for “ACC”!

The coordinates put it in Bootes. But there was a nearly full Moon last night. Would it really have been clearly visible to the eye against the wash? What is the magnitude of the sky under such conditions?

“Happily for us, GRBs always appear hundreds of millions or billions of light years away.”

Always? really? What “facts” are you basing this statement on? I thought that it was possible for almost any star to explode releasing a GRB, but if GRBs “always” appear that far away, I guess we have nothing to worry about.

Well, just to sort of clarify the incomprehensible gibberish in the above post (it’s in Dutch), it’s a citation of a post in an Astrology Blog and it states a lot of technical data, some of which is mentioned in Phill’s post. But it also mentions that there is talk of calling the gamma-ray-burst the Arthur C Clarke burst, as it happened the day poor Art passed on. The final statement it makes is: Coincidence? Well, yes, but by all means, make it so!
On a side note, what if a gamma ray burst happened some 2000 lightyears ago, wouldn’t it be close and strong enough to wipe us out right about this time, provided it was pointed exactly at us? Or would you see some evidence of it today so we can safely say, no there weren’t any bursts in the past that could have threatened us today?

Some years ago, there was a role-playing game that had size categories for firearms: Small Gun, Medium Gun, Big Gun, Really Huge Gun, and Please Don’t Point That At My Planet. It’s rather humbling to realize that that last category is nothing compared to what nature has built on her own.

Ghank, the closest GRB for which we have a distance was several hundred million light years away. So the fact I am basing this on is, well, fact. That’s not to say one can’t happen closer, but it’s unlikely. GRBs were probably more common in the early Universe for a variety of reasons, which I have written about before. Follow the links in the article.

Oops — the nearest GRB was GRB980425 at a distance of roughly 130 million light years (and it was underluminous, very faint for a GRB). So “several hundred million” was an overestimate, but the point remains that none has been seen even as close by as the nearest cluster of galaxies.

Wait a sec! To all those that are saying this was a sign of ACC completing the journey… Wasn’t ACC an atheist? So, he didn’t go anywhere…

Me bad… I spanked myself.

It is awesome to realize that our solar system had not been born when this star exploded. Just think of other worlds that may have seen this event before we did. I wonder, if there were any intelligent beings there, what their thoughts were? All I can say is wow!

BTW, I loved ACC’s works. It is what turned me on to all things Space related. Unfortunately, when I went through my “religious” phase, those books got turfed because some fundies convinced me that they were of the debil. How sad.

There hasn’t been a GRB close enough (and pointed close enough to us) to destroy all life on Earth for at least 500 million years, probably for much longer. This puts a lower limit on the typical distance. The chance of pointing at us is random, and the width of the cone of destruction is determined by the physics, so the only thing left is “how often do they happen in a given volume of space?” In other words,
“how many GRB’s per trillion cubic light years per billion years?” We don’t know enough yet to answer this precisely, but we do know it is a very small number (probably much less than 1), and enough to make useful estimates. The the 2nd interesting question is “Is this number declining over the life of the Universe?”, and yes, it seems to be. GRB’s are rarer now than they were billions of years ago.

But if one has got it in its sights, I for one welcome our new gammatic overlords.

Is it at all possible that this was some sort of massive rail gun-like weapon fired directly at Earth? It may be many light years away so the huge energy burst is detected but the projectile is not. Now we have no choice but to wait for the inevitable.
Just a crazy scifi-fueled theory.

It’s so hard to imagine that we’re directly in the path of this gigantic explosion.

WE SAW IT!!! Here in Toronto, my friend’s apartment has a clear view and very large windows overlooking the western part of the sky. We were watching a movie with the lights inside turned down. All of a sudden the whole sky outside lit up. We thought that was very unusual and explained it away as a lightening/storm system moving into the area.

Oh good grief…” # ???? | ??”….it’s not all that bad! I see you got all choked up and didn’t have anything to say in your comment, but don’t worry. I’ll share my marshmallows with you. But, you’ll have to find your own really long stick tho. But Hurry up…..the next event may come before we’re ready!

[[I thought that it was possible for almost any star to explode releasing a GRB, but if GRBs “always” appear that far away, I guess we have nothing to worry about.]]

No. Most stars cannot explode. The only stars that explode are very massive ones at the very end of their lifetimes. This is considerably less than 1% of stars in general.

Stars work by fusing hydrogen to helium at their cores. When they do this they are on the “main sequence” displayed in the HR diagram. About 90% of stars are main sequence stars, including the sun.

When the core hydrogen is used up, the core compresses, and the hydrogen around that starts to burn — “shell burning.” If the star is large enough, the helium now at the core will eventually ignite, fusing into carbon. The larger the star, the more weird types of fusion eventually go on at the core. Really massive old stars exhibit an “onion-ring” structure with a layer of hydrogen enclosing one of helium, which encloses one of carbon, etc., etc. The sequence can go all the way to silicon fusing into iron, and when this happens — “the silicon-burning day,” since it only takes a couple dozen hours — fusion can’t go on any more. Iron-56 is near the bottom of the packing-fraction curve, so you can’t get it to fuse without an input of energy the star just doesn’t have. Your massive star with an iron core suddenly collapses — all the layers get compressed as they fall inward — and most of the mass of the star fuses at once. You get a Type II supernova. Try not to be near one of those when it goes off.

The gamma-ray bursters must be an especially large class of old, dying star. It may be that stars that massive aren’t around any more, which is why all the GRBs we’ve seen so far are far away — we’re seeing fossil light; they all happened a long time ago. I hope that’s the case; it would make the universe a little friendlier to life and intelligence, which might not have existed that far back in universal history. But I don’t think all the data is in yet.

[[Wait a sec! To all those that are saying this was a sign of ACC completing the journey… Wasn’t ACC an atheist? So, he didn’t go anywhere…

BTW, I loved ACC’s works. It is what turned me on to all things Space related. Unfortunately, when I went through my “religious” phase, those books got turfed because some fundies convinced me that they were of the debil. How sad.]]

Arthur C. Clarke was not an atheist. He was a believer in the modernist religion Creative Evolution (Henri Bergson, L’Evolution Creatrice, 1907). To CE folks (though not to biologists) evolution has an “upward” direction that just keeps getting better and better, and humanity will eventually evolve into a superbeing. This was the theme of Clarke’s classic SF novel, Childhood’s End (1955?), and could also be seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Other writers on Creative Evolution include the late Teilhard de Chardin and Frank J. Tipler.

I don’t understand something. They say “The enormous energy released in the explosion – brighter than the light from all of the stars in five million Milky Way Galaxies – was caused by the death of a massive star which collapsed to form a black hole”

What exactly are they saying? Is this GRB releasing the amount of energy that is contained in five million Milky Way Galaxies (very hard to believe) or is the amount of energy released from this GRB equivalent to the amount of light that falls on the earth from five million Milky Way Galaxies. Or, is there another explanation?

What that means is that the wattage-the rate at which energy is being released-is greater than that of some huge number of galaxies. But it can only sustain that rate for a very brief length of time. It’s rather like money and spending. I may have no more money in the bank than anyone else on average. In principle it’s possible for me to spend what I have recklessly, much faster than the rate of all my more thrifty neighbors combined. But it won’t last very long.

People talk as if it were a fact that GRBs give off their energy in beams (rather than in every direction). I know there was some evidence for beaming recently (I think it was a paper in Nature or Science), but my impression was that the evidence was somewhat sketchy. Has there more evidence generated for the hypothesis that GRBs give off their energy in beams? Just looking at the NASA photograph, it looks like the thing was giving off energy in every direction. Would it take a force much more powerful than the burst itself to direct all that energy into beams?

Stop and think for a second folks, an explosion 7.5 billion light years away that was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye? How could any of you possibly believe something so ridiculous?

Gamma Ray Bursts are caused by dying white dwarfs. They run out of incoming current energy, this causes electrostatic repulsive forces between the protons in the positively charged central plasma to begin to overwhelm the attractive magnetic field stacking energy of Birkland currents. Once the repulsive force overwhelms the attractive force the whole thing goes kaboom. What’s left over afterward is the dense negative/electron plasma that occupied the space on the other side of the dual layer between positively and negatively charged solar plasma. This negative plasma then emits synchrotron radiation.

Please, google gamma ray bursts in the laboratory. You can make the exact same thing we see in space happen here on earth using a small scale version of what I just described. First there’s the polar explosion, then there’s the synchrotron radiation.

As to why people think it’s so far away, that’s based on the “redshift is ONLY, ONLY, ONLY and under no circumstances every caused by anything but recessional velocity and therefore distance.” Has anyone ever shown you a shred of evidence for that position? No, they haven’t, because it’s wrong. Actual redshift and distance measurements (based on paralax and other methods) show no linear relationship. Rather, certain redshifts are favored, indicating red shifting is somehow quantized, and what quantum of red shifting the galaxy shows does not relate to how far away it is.

The reason people think there have to be black holes at the center of these bursts, instead of wimpy white dwarfs, is the way the incorrect distance measurement forces the observed energy to ridiculous levels. I expect respected cosmologists will have to come up with some new type of super massive black hole neutron start collision nonsense to explain away the huge amount of energy the math will say that burst produced.

Please folks, use your own minds and stop trusting the government bureaucrats to think for you. The sheer mass of non-empirical objects like dark matter, dark energy, ort clouds, neutronium, black holes that emit antimatter, and so on, should have clued you in some time ago that this whole gravity explains everything theory is a bunch of BS. As Heracleitus said, “It is the thunderbolt that steers the Universe.”

You need to study a “little” bit of cosmology…
There is a very suitable paper for you, “Expanding Confusion: common misconceptions of cosmological horizons and the superluminal expansion of the Universe” (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808). If you already have a confused mind have, imagine after reading this paper…
Thus, if that one is high-level for you, I recommend you “Distance measures in cosmology” (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9905116).
Read and study before speaking nonsense…

First of all, there are many definitions of cosmological distances. This “naked-eye” GRB 080319B happened 7.5 billion years ago (redshift z = 0.94). There is a strong relation between time and z, but it is not linear whatsoever! The correspondent luminosity distance is ~ 20 billion light years, and it’s this distance that must be used in the absolute magnitude formula.

I guess you became more upset now, if 7.5 billion light years was something so ridiculous to believe, imagine now 20 billion light years, right???

GRB 080319B was one of four bursts that Swift detected, a Swift record for one day. “Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts,” said Swift science team member Judith Racusin of Penn State University in University Park, Pa.

I read the papers you linked and neither of them relate in any way to the argument I was making. Please, if you’d like me to believe there is a relationship of some sort between redshift and distance link me to published data that relates reliable measurements of distance to redshift. I’ve seen a lot of compilations of said data and none are in any way consistent with the Hubble law.

The first paper you linked dealt with the descriptive differences in special and general relativistic formulations of an expanding universe. Please, take a second look at part 5, “discussion” where the author concedes he has no empirical evidence for his positions but rather just finds them intuitively more appealing. The author says, “If
recession velocity were meaningless we could not refer to an “expanding universe” and would have to restrict ourselves to some operational description such as ‘fainter objects have larger redshifts.'”

The author concedes the only justification for his view of redshifts is his commitment to the expanding universe idea. I guess you hoped the paper would be too “high level for me” and that I wouldn’t be able to see the flaws in the logic?

The second paper has absolutely nothing to do with my argument. I frankly find it insulting you would think I was so completely unfamiliar with the ideas of how to measure cosmological distances. But the most important point is the paper is not a compilation of empirical evidence, rather it’s just an overview of conclusions. Please, if there really is some sort of empirical evidence for the redshift distance relationship, let me read that paper. But until then, don’t link irrelevant papers and tell me to read em before I speak nonsense. Remember, Mr. What???, you are the one who thinks an explosion 7.5 billion light years away could be seen with the naked eye. That’s phenomenally stupid. You also conflate something being 7.5 billion light years away as being the same as an event happening 7.5 billion years in “the past.” What the hell past are you talking about? 7.5 billion years ago for who? Earth? That star? A galaxy one million light years off to the left? People talking about so many light years away means so many light years in the past completely misunderstand time in general relativity.

Dr. LHA, every term I used is a specific term of art in plasma cosmology. I know you may find it challenging, and as a fan of star trek myself I can see how you might make that mistake. However, just because you don’t know what a term of art means doesn’t mean it is necessarily star trek gibberish. It quite arrogant on your part to assume that because you don’t understand something it must be nonsense.

hi iam very eager to see some incident like which some saw a gamma ray burst in the sky with their naked eye . iam always unfortunate to see all such incidents because it wont talk more with the people. even i read only in this howstuffworks website,not through other people , if anybody having videos of this GRB’s please send through this website. thank yu

Ryan, it’s exactly because I DO think for myself that I reject pseudoscience like the electric universe theory. The evidence that the red shift is cosmological is overwhelming, Halton Arp to the contrary. And if neutronium doesn’t exist, kindly explain what pulsars are made of. Is all of nuclear physics wrong along with all of modern astronomy?

The reason I doubt anyone could see an explosion from that far off is the amount of energy necessary to get that light all the way here in such a bright state. I’m sure you know the theories behind GRB’s, that they are so energetic they have to be caused by collapsing super massive black holes or colliding neutron stars. The sheer volume of energy and the sheer mass of non-empirical object necessary to produce such a thing is never experienced anywhere near the Earth. That doesn’t make a wink of sense. If these explosions are part of the universe they shouldn’t only be a part of distant quadrants or distant times in the past. I mean, that’s what you are saying right? A long long time ago there were these huge things called neutron stars and from time to time a couple of them half the size of our solar system would slam into each other, but it never happens any more, and it never happened anywhere nearby. Listen, a day later I completely regret using the word stupid, and I’m sorry to anyone who was offended, it’s just rather unbelievable and I’d like to think people would not accept it on faith.

If you look at the history of inflation theory and the big bang theory, every time we make better telescopes we find incredibly interesting things that don’t line up with the old model, so ad hoc modifications are made up. GRB’s used to be of reasonable size, and so they were thought to be a sort of supernova. Then we found bigger ones and offered black holes as the ad hoc excuse. Then GRB’s were discovered in boring parts of the edges of spiral galaxies, where, according to gravity cosmology, there are no black holes, so the ad hoc explanation of colliding neutron stars was proffered. I mean, doesn’t that clue you in that there’s some problem?

Compare that to the electric model. First, it’s based on experimental evidence. You can make a GRB in a laboratory that closely resembled GRB’s in space. And, the mechanism for a GRB in a capacitor as star electric model perfectly explains why synchrotron radiation almost always follows the explosion. However, the electric model doesn’t require a thousand different types of these explosions to deal with sizes varying over several orders of magnitude. That is only required in the gravity theorists who have to explain how some GRB’s could be thousands of times more powerful than others, which species of the same event should by logic not be. And the “relativistic shock fronts” necessary to churn up all the baryonic matter into gamma rays are pretty darn non-empirical.

I’m not sure what ‘overwhelming’ evidence for the Hubble law you are referring to. I’ve seen compilations of distance versus red shift for galaxies and objects for distances close enough to be measured with methods other than the Hubble law. In each case there is no linear relationship between red shift and distance. It’s a mild correlation at best. If there is some data set out there that shows known distances versus red shift and a R^2>.9 linear relationship I’d like to see that data. If there is no such data set then how in the world could there be any “proof?”

As for so called neutron stars. Let’s talk about what’s actually being observed. It’s a pulsing radio signal. It emits short bursts of light at frequencies sometimes reaching thousands of hertz. It’s easy to make such a thing happen on Earth. Get yourself two capacitors, a voltage source and a non linear resister. Stick an amp meter on the sucker and watch the current pulse by at those same high frequencies. High frequency radio sources in deep space arise for the same reason. A star is highly energetic plasma where the nuclei of the ionized atoms migrate toward the center and the electrons migrate outwards. In between the two what’s referred to as a “dual layer” forms where most of the electrical potential energy is concentrated. This dual layer acts just like a capacitor, it stores voltage. So, the radio sources are quite likely binary star systems, where the two stars as capacitors exchange current in a non-linear way.

Compare that with neutronium for a moment. The radio source is assumed without any corroborating evidence to be a strobe light effect, a beam is rotating very quickly and we’re catching the flashes, like a lighthouse. The highest frequency radio sources correspond to rotational speeds of several hundred revolutions per second. Since a star made of empirical matter would fly apart in no time at those speeds, a new sort of matter had to be invented ad hoc to not fly apart at those speeds. Enter neutronium. You asked me if all of nuclear physics must be wrong? How can you ask me that when it’s neutronium that flies in the face of nuclear physics. No two neutrons ever under any circumstance stick together outside of a nucleus. You could shoot two streams of them together at near the speed of light for the rest of your life and no two will stick together, but somehow trillions can? I know someone must have told you they had evidence that it could happen, but I bet you it wasn’t experimental data or an observation of some sort, but rather it was a large pile of mathematical equations. Math is not evidence, it’s a model. It’s not an explanation, it’s a way of parsing explanations that are too complex to be communicated in words.

C’mon y’all. We “know” there is such a thing as “dark matter” because we “know” that only gravity governs the motion of a spiral galaxy, and that for gravity to make the galaxy move that way there would have to be a ton of other matter distributed in fantastically odd shapes. In plasma cosmology spiral galaxies move exactly like they’re predicted to, with no ad hoc invisible matter helping.

I appreciate the fact that you want to base your positions on evidence and not pseudoscience, but what evidence are the gravity theorists giving you? When do they say, “I made this happen in the laboratory and it’s just like what we see in the telescope.” They never say that, when you’re looking at a telescope they’re singing a country song called “don’t trust your lying eyes.”

To the extent that modern astronomy asks you to believe in non-empirical things like dark matter, dark energy, neutron starts and ort clouds, then it’s the one that ought to be called pseudoscience. I think your aversion to the electric universe model probably arose from you having a bad teacher. Try the thunderbolts.com webpage, they sell books and link to papers that you might find interesting.

“The highest redshift system that we identify based on the MgII doublet and various other features has z=0.937, the presumed redshift of GRB 080319B”

One question does occur to me. If the GRB is being caused by a blackhole in formation then how do we know that the observed redshift of 0.937 is cosmological in nature and not a gravitational redshift caused by the photons climbing out of an intense gravity well? Is there a way to tell the difference between a cosmological redshift and a gravitational redshift observationally?

And why did Chinese astronomers observe a supernova in the year 1054 CE at exactly the same location where we observe the Crab Nebula and its associated pulsar today? Where is the binary star system in the Crab Nebula? Where is the binary star system in the Vela Nebula?

I don’t have a puny brain. If I did, I would be insulted by the reference in your article that suggests all people have puny brains.

And theres nothing to be afraid of. You’ve referenced everything exciting in your story with fear.

Everything is what it is…

And… I like your column very much. It’s very informative.

I wish I had happened to have been looking up in the sky at that very moment at that very spot. I want to see a GRB.

With 7 billion people, im sure dozens or even hundreds did see it and it’s possible that thousands did —if there was other cause to look up at that moment—

I think there is a good chance and study of the afterglow will show that we did infact see into the direct path of a GRB from
7.5 billion light years in distance. How else could we see it (with the naked eye) from that far away?

Had this occurred from… say… 300 light years away… we wouldn’t be blogging right now…

The star beattlejuice in the constelation orion that is relative to the distance mentioned afore. This star, I’m sure you know, is aging and could go supernova on us in our lifetime, and therefore could… direct a GRB directly at us and destroy us…

The universe is so limitless that i do believe that somewhere right now monkeys are flying out of peoples butts… or some simulation that would make it appear to us that that is infact what we are seeing.

I heard about someone in Montana who was observing when he received the alert for this GRB… he actually saw it with a pair of binoculars, and later with his 20″ telescope. That’s incredible to me. Not quite unaided, but very close. I’d be thrilled to visually catch any afterglow that distant, even with optical aid.